Man charged in slaying of Miss. mayoral candidate

Updated 8:13 PM ET

JACKSON, Miss. A 22-year-old man was charged with murder Thursday in the death of a mayoral candidate in the Mississippi Delta.

The Coahoma County Sheriff's Department said in a news release that Lawrence Reed of Shelby was charged in the death of Marco McMillian. McMillian, 34, was a candidate for mayor of Clarksdale and was well-known in the community and beyond.

An investigation began Tuesday when a man crashed McMillian's SUV into another car on U.S. Highway 49 near the Coahoma and Tallahatchie county lines. The candidate wasn't in the car.

McMillian's body was found near the Mississippi River levee Wednesday morning between Sherard and Rena Lara, Coahoma County Coroner Scotty Meredith has said.

The body was sent for an autopsy, and the cause of death hasn't been made public.

"There's a lot of people upset about it," said Dennis Thomas, 33, who works at Abe's Barbeque.

"Why would somebody want to do something like that to somebody of that caliber? He was a highly respected person in town," Thomas said.

The Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and Institute tweeted:

The sheriff's department has not released a possible motive for the crime.

Campaign spokesman Jarod Keith has said McMillian's campaign was noteworthy because he may have been the first openly gay man to be a viable candidate for public office in Mississippi.

McMillian, who was black, had forged ties while serving for four years as international executive director of the historically black Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc. Photos on McMillian's website and Facebook page show him with a younger Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and with U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat.

McMillian was CEO of MWM & Associates, described on its website as a consulting firm for nonprofit organizations. In addition to his role at the fraternity from 2007 to 2011, McMillian had previously worked to raise funds as executive assistant to the president at Alabama A&M University and as assistant to the vice president at Jackson State University, according to his campaign.

A statement from the fraternity said he had secured the first federal contract to raise awareness about the impact of HIV and AIDS on communities of color. It noted that Ebony Magazine had recognized him in 2004 as one of the nation's "30 up-and-coming African Americans" under age 30.

Supporters say McMillian — a 1997 graduate of Clarksdale High School who graduated magna cum laude from Jackson State and held a master's degree from St. Mary's University in Minnesota in philanthropy and development — had big ideas for Clarksdale, a town of about 17,800 people.

The town is well known to blues fans as the home of the crossroads, where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil for skills with a guitar. Academy Award-winning actor and Mississippi native Morgan Freeman is part owner of the Ground Zero Blues Club in town. Clarksdale also is hounded by the poverty typical of the Mississippi Delta.

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Sequestration: Surrender Is in the Air

The budget ax is about to fall, and there's little lawmakers in Washington are doing to stop it.

Despite a parade of dire warnings from the White House, an $85 billion package of deep automatic spending cuts appears poised to take effect at the stroke of midnight on Friday.

The cuts – known in Washington-speak as the sequester – will hit every federal budget, from defense to education, and even the president's own staff.

On Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats and Republicans each staged votes Thursday aimed at substituting the indiscriminate across-the-board cuts with more sensible ones. Democrats also called for including new tax revenue in the mix. Both measures failed.

Lleaders on both sides publicly conceded that the effort was largely for show, with little chance the opposing chamber would embrace the other's plan. They will discuss their differences with President Obama at the White House on Friday.

"It isn't a plan at all, it's a gimmick," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said today of the Democrats' legislation.

"Republicans call the plan flexibility" in how the cuts are made, said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "Let's call it what it is. It is a punt."

The budget crisis is the product of a longstanding failure of Congress and the White House to compromise on plans for deficit reduction. The sequester itself, enacted in late 2011, was intended to be so unpalatable as to help force a deal.

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Republicans and Democrats, however, remain gridlocked over the issue of taxes.

Obama has mandated that any steps to offset the automatic cuts must include new tax revenue through the elimination of loopholes and deductions. House Speaker John Boehner and the GOP insist the approach should be spending cuts-only, modifying the package to make it more reasonable.

"Do we want to close loopholes? We sure do. But if we are going to do tax reform, it should focus on creating jobs, not funding more government," House Speaker John Boehner said, explaining his opposition to Obama's plan.

Boehner, McConnell, Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will huddle with Obama at the White House on Friday for the first face-to-face meeting of the group this year.

"There are no preconditions to a meeting like this," White House spokesman Jay Carney said today. "The immediate purpose of the meeting is to discuss the imminent sequester deadline and to avert it."

Even if the leaders reach a deal, there's almost no chance a compromise could be enacted before the deadline. Lawmakers are expected to recess later today for a long weekend in their districts.

What will be the short-term impact of the automatic cuts?

Officials say it will be a gradual, "rolling impact" with limited visible impact across the country in the first few weeks that the cuts are allowed to stand.

Over the long term, however, the Congressional Budget Office and independent economic analysts have warned sequester could lead to economic contraction and possibly a recession.

"This is going to be a big hit on the economy," Obama said Wednesday night.

"It means that you have fewer customers with money in their pockets ready to buy your goods and services. It means that the global economy will be weaker," he said. "And the worst part of it is, it's entirely unnecessary."

Both sides say that if the cuts take effect, the next best chance for a resolution could come next month when the parties need to enact a new federal budget. Government funding runs out on March 27, raising the specter of a federal shutdown if they still can't reach a deal.

"As we anticipate an across-the-board budget cuts across our land, we still expect to see your goodness prevail, O God, " Senate Chaplain Barry Black prayed on the Senate floor this morning, "and save us from ourselves."

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Quantum skyfall puts Einstein's gravity to the test

DIVIDING a falling cloud of frozen atoms sounds like an exotic weather experiment. In fact, it's the latest way to probe whether tiny objects obey Einstein's theory of general relativity, our leading explanation for gravity.

General relativity is based on the equivalence principle, which says that in free fall, all objects fall at the same rate, whatever their mass, provided the only force at work is gravity. That has been proven for large objects: legend has it that Galileo did it first by dropping various balls from the Tower of Pisa. Whether equivalence holds at quantum scales, where gravity's effects are not well understood, isn't clear. Figuring it out could help create a quantum theory of gravity, one of the biggest goals of modern physics.

Creating a quantum equivalent of Galileo's test isn't easy. In 2010 a team led by Ernst Rasel of the University of Hannover in Germany monitored a quantum object in free fall, by tossing a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) – a cloud of chilled atoms that behaves as a single quantum object and so is both particle and wave – down a 110-metre tall tower. Now they have split and recombined the wave – all before the BEC, made of rubidium atoms, reached the bottom. This produces an interference pattern that records the path of the falling atoms and can be used to calculate their acceleration (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/km6). The next step is to do the same experiment on a different kind of atom, with a different mass, to see if the equivalence principle holds.

The BEC can only be split for 100 milliseconds in the tower before hitting the bottom, so to allow tiny differences between the atom types to emerge, the work must be repeated in space, where the waves can be split for longer. By showing that a matter-wave can be split and recombined while falling, Rasel's result is a "major step" towards the space version, says Charles Wang of the University of Aberdeen, UK.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Quantum skyfall tests Einstein's gravity"

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Basketball: Knicks withstand Curry's 54 points to beat Warriors

NEW YORK: The New York Knicks withstood a dazzling 54-point display from Golden State's Stephen Curry on Wednesday to post a 109-105 NBA victory over the Warriors at Madison Square Garden.

Curry's points total was the highest in the league this season, surpassing the 52 of Oklahoma City's Kevin Durant against Dallas last month.

But his individual effort was not enough against a Knicks team that received 35 points from Carmelo Anthony and 26 off the bench from JR Smith.

Tyson Chandler contributed 16 points for New York and grabbed a career-best 28 rebounds.

Curry and the Warriors nearly claimed the victory despite the absence of David Lee, serving a one-game suspension for his role in an altercation with the Pacers' Roy Hibbert at Indiana on Tuesday that included several players and saw the shoving match spill into the spectator area behind the basket.

Curry made 11 of his 13 attempts from three-point range, one short of the league single-game record. He added seven assists and six rebounds.

Carl Landry scored 15 points and Jarrett Jack chipped in 14 for the Warriors.

Curry became the first player to score at least 50 points at Madison Square Garden since LeBron James did it with the Cavaliers in 2009.

He scored or assisted on Golden State's last 20 points. By then the New York crowd was cheering him, but the Knicks held the Warriors scoreless for the last two minutes of the contest.

After Raymond Felton denied Curry's jump shot with 1:28 remaining and the score knotted at 105-105, New York's Smith made a jump shot that gave the Knicks the lead for good.

"We closed out," Knicks coach Mike Woodson said. "We made the defensive stops we had to make coming down the stretch.

"We made plays, but boy, you've got to tip your hat to Curry. He played great."

- AFP/fa

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Woman: I was fired for having sex

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Federal budget cuts free illegal immigrants from detention

(CBS News) -- The federal budget cuts expected to take effect this Friday are not simple. For example, hundreds of illegal immigrants are being released from detention because the administration says it can't afford to keep them.

Until recently, Fredi Alcazar was one of those detained. An illegal immigrant from Mexico, Alcazar spent a month in jail after a traffic stop near Atlanta last December. He now wears an electronic monitoring band on his ankle. The device lets immigration officials know where he is at all times.

(watch: Releasing illegal immigrants over budget cuts, below)

Alcazar was released unexpectedly in January.

"I was surprised they released me," Alcazar recalled. "They didn't say anything."

Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would not tell CBS exactly how many detainees they released ahead of for Friday's automatic budget cuts. They also declined to say where or when the releases occurred.

Those let go, like Fredi Alcazar, are required to wear electronic tracking devices, regularly call immigration officials or visit ICE offices.

"We started getting calls all of a sudden they had been released," said immigration advocate Dulce Guerrero. "We were very much in shock."

The early release of detainees was a surprise to Guerrero.

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"These folks are no criminals," she said. "These folks in there are moms, dads, students, community members who are in there for no license, for a broken tail light."

But some members of Congress are demanding ICE provide information on each detainee's case.

"When you release these people and expect them to show up at a court proceeding at a later date, we found before that 90 percent of them don't show up," said Congressman Michael McCaul, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee.

Besides Georgia, CBS did learn that many releases were in Arizona, California and Florida. Immigration advocates said that "supervised release" costs about $14 a day compared to about $160 a day to keep detainees in jail.

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Arias Prosecutor Too Combative, Experts Say

He has barked, yelled, been sarcastic and demanded answers from accused murderer Jodi Arias this week.

And in doing so, prosecutor Juan Martinez and his aggressive antics may be turning off the jury he is hoping to convince that Arias killed her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander in June 2008, experts told ABCNews.com today.

"Martinez is his own worst enemy," Mel McDonald, a prominent Phoenix defense attorney and former judge, told ABC News. "He takes it to the point where it's ad nauseam. You have difficulty recognizing when he's driving the point home because he's always angry and pushy and pacing around the courtroom. He loses the effectiveness, rather than build it up."

"He's like a rabid dog and believes you've got to go to everybody's throat," he said.

"If they convict her and give her death, they do it in spite of Juan, not because of him," McDonald added.

Martinez's needling style was on display again today as he pestered Arias to admit that she willingly participated in kinky sex with Alexander, though she previously testified that she only succumbed to his erotic fantasies to please him.

Arias, now 32, and Alexander, who was 27 at the time of his death, dated for a year and continued to sleep together for another year following their break-up.

Arias drove to his house in Mesa, Ariz., in June 2008, had sex with him, they took nude photos together and she killed him in his shower. She claims it was in self-defense. If convicted, Arias could face the death penalty.

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Martinez also attempted to point out inconsistencies in her story of the killing, bickering with her over details about her journey from Yreka, Calif., to Mesa, Ariz., including why she borrowed gas cans from an ex-boyfriend, when she allegedly took naps and got lost while driving, and why she spontaneously decided to visit Alexander at his home in Mesa for a sexual liaison.

"I want to know what you're talking about," Arias said to Martinez at one point.

"No, I'm asking you," he yelled.

Later, he bellowed, "Am I asking you if you're telling the truth?"

"I don't know," Arias said, firing back at him. "Are you?"

During three days of cross examining Arias this week, Martinez has spent hours going back and forth with the defendant over word choice, her memory, and her answers to his questions.

"Everyone who takes witness stand for defense is an enemy," McDonald said. "He prides himself on being able to work by rarely referring to his notes, but what he's giving up in that is that there's so much time he wastes on stupid comments. A lot of what I've heard is utterly objectionable."

Martinez's behavior has spurred frequent objections of "witness badgering" from Arias' attorney Kirk Nurmi, who at one point Tuesday stood up in court and appealed to the judge to have a conference with all of the attorneys before questioning continued. Judge Sherry Stephens at one point admonished Martinez and Arias for speaking over one another.

Andy Hill, a former spokesperson for the Phoenix police department, and Steven Pitt, a forensic psychiatrist who has testified as an expert witness at many trials in the Phoenix area, both said that despite his aggressive style, Martinez would likely succeed in obtaining a guilty verdict.

"When it comes to cross examination, one size does not fit all," said Pitt. "But if you set aside the incessant sparring, what the prosecutor I believe is effectively doing is pointing out the various inconsistencies in the defendant's version of events."

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Newly spotted comet to buzz Mars in 2014

Lisa Grossman, physical sciences reporter

A Martian sunset, as seen by NASA's Spirit rover in 2005.
(Image: Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Texas A&M, Cornell, JPL, NASA)

There's a new comet in town, and it is making a beeline for Mars. If projections of its orbit are correct, the icy visitor will buzz the Red Planet in October 2014.

Dubbed C/2013 A1, the comet was discovered on 3 January by prolific comet hunter Robert McNaught at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. Colleagues at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona found images of the comet in their catalogue that date back to 8 December 2012, giving additional information about its movements.

These observations allowed astronomers to trace the comet's likely path around the sun. The calculated trajectory has C/2013 A1 crossing Mars' orbit on 19 October 2014, according to Australian blogger Ian Musgrave.

That doesn't necessarily mean a collision will occur. The best estimates right now have the comet passing a safe distance of 900,000 kilometres from the Martian surface. Asteroid 2012 DA14 got much closer to Earth last week, skimming by at a distance of 34,400 kilometres. But with so little data in hand, the calculations are not precise. It's possible the comet will miss Mars by as much as 36 million kilometres - or it could smack right into the planet. "An impact can't be ruled out at this stage," Musgrave wrote.

From Earth, we should be able to see the comet and Mars sitting side by side through small telescopes. And from Mars, the comet could be as spectacular as the expected "supercomet" ISON, which will come into view this year and could outshine the full moon.

Assuming the comet's orbit brings it close enough - but not too close - to Mars, the object should be visible either by rovers on the surface or the armada of Mars-orbiting satellites, which have a history of snapping spectacular shots of the Red Planet and its neighborhood.

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Ferrari goes up in flames at Teban Gardens

SINGAPORE: A red Ferrari went up in flames near Teban Gardens Road on Wednesday.

A Channel NewsAsia viewer was having his lunch at a coffee shop in the vicinity when he heard an explosion.

According to the viewer, the red Ferrari had stopped in front of block 54 Teban Gardens Road, along Penjuru Road.

The Chinese male driver had gotten out of the car before the explosion.

The driver did not appear to have been injured.

The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) arrived five minutes later and put out the fire.

SCDF confirmed that there were no reported injuries and that no other vehicle was involved in the incident.

The cause of the fire is being investigated.

- CNA/ck

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Doomed balloon riders nearly landed, then shot upward

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• NEW: Conflicting reports emerge over company's safety record


• A British passenger and the pilot are hospitalized


• The balloon carried tourists from the UK, Hong Kong, Japan, France and Hungary


• A gas explosion caused the balloon to fall about 300 meters (almost 1,000 feet)

Were you there? Have you taken such a trip before in Egypt? Send us your experiences.

(CNN) -- The view from above southern Egypt is stunning, a contrast of beige desert valley giving way to green farmland, including fields of sugar cane. Tourists soak in the sight by hiring hot air balloons that have large baskets to carry passengers hundreds of feet above the countryside.

Tuesday morning, as one of the balloons prepared to land, an explosion pierced the air, followed by a spreading billow of smoke.

"My first thought was that it was sugar cane that was burning," said Christopher Michel, a photographer who was a passenger in another balloon at the time.

Smoke from the burning sugar cane painted the ancient city of Luxor below with an eerie haziness.

But the concern shown by the balloon pilot and the blaring sirens from emergency vehicles told Michel that something was wrong. He could not imagine the extent: One of the balloons had exploded, and its 21 passengers and operators plummeted about 1,000 feet (300 meters) to the ground.

By Tuesday afternoon, the number of dead had climbed to 19, making it the world's deadliest hot air balloon accident in at least 20 years.

"This juxtaposition of this great beauty and this wonderful country and this horrible tragedy is just really shocking," Michel told CNN. "We all feel terrible."

It was an early, dark morning, Michel said, and uneventful for 45 minutes until they started to descend. He was overlooking mud-brick buildings and fields, with the Valley of the Kings in the distance, when the explosion shattered the quiet of the morning.

It was a gas explosion, state-run EgyNews reported.

Fatal hot air balloon crash

HIDE CAPTION

Passengers in the balloon included 19 foreign tourists: nine from Hong Kong, four from Japan, three from Britain, two from France and one from Hungary, officials said.

An Egyptian pilot and another Egyptian also were on board, Luxor province spokesman Badawi al-Masri said.

Two people -- a Briton and the pilot -- are hospitalized.

Balloon rides offering panoramic aerial views of the Nile River and the ancient temples of Karnak and Hatshepsut are a popular tourist attraction in Luxor, about a nine-hour drive southeast of Cairo.

"You can see Valley of the Kings in the background bordered by farmland," Pauline Liang of Vancouver, Canada, told CNN's iReport last year. "Below were banana farms, and behind us was the city of Luxor. There was a great contrast between desert landscape, lush farmland and urban development."

Tuesday's crash prompted Gov. Izzat Saad of Luxor province to ban all hot air balloon flights until further notice.

Conflicting reports emerged about the company that operated the doomed balloon, Sky Cruise.

The head of the country's civil aviation authority said the company was licensed and working legally, EgyNews reported.

The agency has begun an investigation of the incident, Mohammed Ibrahim Sharif said.

According to Sharif, a fire broke out in the balloon while the workers were trying to land it, just feet from the ground. The balloon then shot upwards again, he said.

The balloon's basket was divided into four parts, he said, each holding five passengers.

Meanwhile, Luxor's chamber of tourism said the company had previous violations, EgyNews reported.

Several balloon companies had terminated contracts with the local meteorological service after the Egyptian revolution, Tharwat Agami, chairman of the chamber of tourism, said.

Sky Cruise and other companies were known to violate safety and security instructions by flying out of East Luxor, instead of the recommended West Luxor, he said.

Comparing it to a previous hot air balloon experience in another country, Michel noted that there was no safety briefing before the Luxor balloons lifted off the ground, but added that he felt safe during the trip.

From what he could tell, the doomed balloon was not overloaded, he said on his Twitter account.

Luxor is among Egypt's top tourist draws. Visitors go to see ancient temples and tombs, and travel sites often recommend the hot air balloon trips.

The last hot air balloon accident in Luxor occurred in 2009, when 16 foreign tourists were injured after a balloon struck a cell phone transmission tower.

Until Tuesday's incident, the deadliest accident in recent memory took place in 1989, when 13 people were killed as two hot air balloons collided in Australia.

Egyptian government spokesman Alaa Hadidi announced that the Cabinet will form a committee from the Ministry of Civil Aviation to investigate Tuesday's accident, EgyNews said.

CNN's Housam Ahmed and Hamdi Alkhshali, along with journalist Adam Makary in Cairo, contributed to this report.

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